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Psychology in UX

Have you ever had a nightmare where you were literally drowning in little red notification badges? I did once, and it got me thinking: what actually are notifications? And are they just another dark pattern – a form of coercion and online trickery? In this article, I explore the phenomenon of “pseudo-notifications”, and conclude with some thoughts on what the future might hold for notifications as a design pattern.
What are notifications? Notifications are nothing new. A doorbell is a notification system to let me know that someone is outside my house. The ring of a telephone is a signal that someone is waiting to talk. And an SMS ringtone notifies me that a message has arrived.

Gamification has been a fairly hot topic for a few years now, and many industries are scrambling to understand it, and to find ways that they can use gamification to improve client engagement in their product(s) Wikipedia defines Gamification as
"Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems and increase users' self-contributions."

Human Cognition

Heuristic Analysis, Cognitive Walkthrough & User Testing are the three most important usability inspection methods so we should know when and how to use each one. Both Heuristic analysis and cognitive walkthrough are good to go as soon as the first design iteration is ready. Once their recommendations have been implemented, you can start user testing.

A little knowledge is dangerous but can be applied to Mobile App design and human interaction — particularly how Apps help us and stress us. From years of mobile product experience, I believe a design’s balance cognitive overload and resultant stress should be a major counter-balance to a Product Manager’s KPI’s to moooaaaar session time in the App. The results of a recent survey of 14,000 people revealed statistics that imply “the more competent you are with Apps, the more trapped you are”. The clear sufferers (“I feel more stressed”) are the most powerful adopters — the 26–55-year-old range and in particular 36–45. These people are mid-career, mid-family and if they are like me they have more than 5 chat Apps with business and social conversations appearing in all of them. The chat is happening while dropping the kids at soccer and their colleague on the chat wants an immediate response (they are sitting at their desk). Older age groups likely have less Apps on their phones and less competing social signals.

Cognitive friction occurs when a user is confronted with an interface or affordance that appears to be intuitive but delivers unexpected results. This mismatch between the outcome of an action and the expected result causes user frustration and will impair the user experience if not jeopardize it. User research can help uncover such problems and generate friction-free design.
Imagine a mouse-operated graphical user interface (GUI) where selecting a folder icon requires two left clicks and opening it requires a right click. This isn’t necessarily a bad way to control the GUI—however, it’s completely counter-intuitive, as our experience with GUIs for decades leads us to expect that a single left click selects an icon and a double left click opens it. The conflict between our expectation and the way the interface works is called cognitive friction. As users will not be comfortable with the prospect of unlearning a conventional way of completing an action, they will reject such a design.

Human, AI and UX

Almost 12,000 people in 139 countries have taken our AI survey — Do You Speak Human? — and the range of their responses suggest that we need to have a much broader debate about the development of AI. We are living in the age of artificial intelligence and we scarcely even realise it. AI explains what we see on our Facebook news feed, how Netflix determines what we should watch next, and why Google Maps can predict where we’re heading when we jump in the car.
And this is just the beginning. Increasingly we will see computer-based life forms in our homes, our cars, our household goods — technology woven into the very fabric of our lives, living alongside us and making decisions on our behalf.

Video

"We build mental models of how the world works and then we apply them to new situations."
In the Decision and Choice making session, User Experience Designer and author Joe Leech talks from a user experience perspective on how to understand the psychology of decision making.
All our past experiences help us make decisions in present time. Therefore, when designing products and websites, designers should always strive for matching the users mental models with the products. Combine this with a conspicuous design, with images that provoke emotions and your products should be easy for people to understand.